“Redbone”

In an episode of Donald Glover’s FX show “Atlanta,” his character Earn accompanies an on-again, off-again girlfriend Van to the Juneteenth party of an old bourgeois friend and her woke white husband, who emphatically catalogs black culture at every turn—among other things, he performs slam poetry about Jim Crow. Over the course of the episode, Earn and Van, then estranged, reconcile and become lovers again. The show opens with the sound of Kamasi Washington and closes with Sam Cooke. If you were to find the intersection of all these points, you’d arrive at “Redbone,” the latest track from Glover’s upcoming album as Childish Gambino, Awaken, My Love! (Coincidentally, a still from the episode was the first glimpse of the album’s artwork.) “Redbone,” a full-blown funk slow jam, parses love, lust, reconciliation, generations of black soul, and wokeness.

“Redbone,” like the episode, seems to string different narratives together. A scene unspools where yearning and desire are aimed at an uncommitted lover, hinting at the title (redbone is slang for a light-skinned black woman) while giving warning in the intermissions. “Stay woke!” he shouts in a half-squeal on the hook. “Niggas creepin’/They gon’ find you/Gon’ catch you sleepin’.” The slapping bass is reminiscent of Funkadelic and Bootsy Collins; the licks melt slowly under his pitched-up vocals. It’s maddeningly familiar yet distinctly warm. After winding up steadily, the song—almost minimalist in composition—closes in a blitz of reverbed synth chords, piano accents, and ambient tones. It’s a sequence that lulls to a trance, then snaps alive. “You better believe in something,” Glover sings, prodding you to decide what exactly that is.